Advanced thinking on the MOBA genre

Sunday, December 22, 2013

So I switched to dota 2 about 2 months or so ago and although it was a rough transition from HON I did it playing IXDL, did alright in there, got top 10 a few times, mostly hovered in the top 30 slots, but anyways, little did i know that it would all be useless when Ranked came out. But guess what, my account was level 4, with ~170 games being played 2 years ago before the leveling system trolling dagon OD games and rod of atos Ursa lol. Anyways, I came back and guess what I had 49% win ratio and was playing with truly atrocious players, getting leavers, throwers, feeders basically every third game or so.

End of intro.
tl;dr pretty good player stuck grinding out matches to get get past elo hell.

Here's how I did, mind you I played matches on the booster packs to speed level.

Here's what I have to let all those who are actually stuck in elo hell.

1) If you are actually better than all those people who you're stuck with, out last hit them, it's absolutely a joke how bad players are at last hitting in elo hell. I've seen some of my replays where I was 40 last hits over my middle before 10 minutes.

2) Don't pick a purely team fight hero oriented hero like puck, sure if you're insanely good with him you have a chance of snowballing, but split pushers/pick off heroes/ semi carries are definitely better, e.g. Storm, Shadow Fiend, !INVOKER!, slark, alchemist, Lone Druid (king of split push), also heroes who can recover in jungle when focused definitely have an edge.

3) CARRY A FUCKING TP, jesus I can't count how many times I've literally teleported out in front of the nose of the enemy cause there was only like 3 stuns versus me. (Also ofc you can tp to help /gank lanes)
Example: http://puu.sh/5UCmL.jpg - Ran into Rosh, killed aegis carrier, teleported out of a losing battle in the very center of it, simple! OFc i had tp boots, but same concept applies. P.s. I had two boots because i was using tp a lot at that point and wanted to not waste cash and invest into better boots, but the stats from treads were still good enough to not replace with another item.

4) Get your farm rotations down

Also, for fucks sake, don't miss stacks, and try to stack ancients early so you can take them mid game, a lot of heroes can take them.

6) Don't panic when you're team is doing poorly, there've been games where 40 minutes into the game there were ~20 kills on my team, of which ONLY ONE wasn't either an assist or kill for me. I won a few of them, lost a couple, went back to watch the replay of one and saw where I could've solo carried my team, usually when 80% of your teams farm is on you it's better to split push / do pick offs because you'll push faster then their five man team. I stalled/won a great deal of games by simply going manta, boots of travel and push stick to split push to the point that I made the enemy rage extremely hard.

7) Keep an eye on your minimap, I rarely get angry about MIA's anymore, I can usually see the mia's now myself of the lanes, and remind the other lanes to call mias, butttttt if your lane goes mia make sure you punish the solo guy left alone while his supports are ganking. or if it's mid that's mia, take his mid tower.

8) And final tip, after 5 minutes, if your hero has the ability to push out the lane and roam/farm jungle do that instead of static farming the lane, you're less likely to get ganked, and more likely to cause enemy to play defensive.

Monday, July 1, 2013

So recently I've come to the realization that a great deal of players truly are at a loss when it comes to how drafting works so I've decided to make this little article + a video in near future explaining it to a greater degree. There is of course swindle's lock picking guide but I find that despite it a great deal of players truly don't understand how it works when spectating tournament games.

Before beginning the most fundamental concept to understand regarding drafting: you are not only trying to get great lanes/synergistic draft but you're attempting to make your opponent draft outside their comfort zone and/or mess up their intended draft.

Secondly, never draft EXPECTING to get something when you don't plan to pick it on the first available pick.

Below we see a diagram of the lock picking, and picking stages labeled by numbers. L = Legion, Hb = hellbourne.

Keeping the diagram above in mind let's begin with the drafting break down.

Blind banning: In genera it's personal preference but I prefer to ban kotf / ophelia as Hellbourne captain as both are extremely flexible in lockpool, as legion my personal picks are tempest / parasite simply because those are the "counter" heroes which are albeit not as flexible are extremely strong.

Lock pick:

L1 : is nearly always used to pickup a jungler/suicide such as a kotf, ophelia, tempest, parasite, wild soul (more or less in that order of importance depending on blind bans) The reasoning behind this is because if you pick a support and HB chooses to lock two initiators or vice versa, and then you either have to lock the power house jungler/suicide after all or let them be banned by HB in reg banning phase. BUT since you now have 3 types of heroes in lock pool, support, initiator, jungler/suicide it is possible for the hellbourne to screw the legion team over if they drafted right.

Example: L1 - rally

L2- aluna

L3- Andromeda

L4- KotF

L5 - Magmus

L6- Glacius

As you can see now, hellbournce can wait to see how you draft to see if they should pick support from the lock pool or from phase #4 in picking stages to screw you over. (You first pick KoTF, they go Rally + magmus if you drafted supports before hand, now you're screwed with a pool of 3 supports)

L2 / L3: Although Legion gets the first pick out of pool, hellbourne gets to set the "tone" of the lock pool following the jungler. Say that there's only ONE power house jungler/suicide, you try to get the best possible trade for you strat or pull out a bluff. You can lock a moon queen, or double initiators, in essence make the legion drafter uncertain about whether you plan to draft hyper aggressive or end game with a hard carry.

Case in point:

Lock pool: KoTF, Moon Queen, Deadwood, Rally, magmus, pebbles

Regular picking stage drafts:

Legion: Engineer, panda, pyromancer

Hellbourne: Torturer, Master of Arms, Bubbles

Now, as the hellbourne i have the ability to pull out an aggressive trilane, carry torurer or master of arms, or bubbles suicide with carry mq top dual lane, dual mid with rally, suicide bubbles. As you can see, legion is now in a situation where they're not sure what direction i'll end up taking my draft until my lock selection stage comes. Although this "flex" lock pool is good it can potentially mean that you're giving them a hero that is extremely powerful (moon queen) should you choose not to pick it.

L6: Assuming the hellbourne/legion have a lock pool of 1 suicide/jungler 4 initiators or 2 suicide/jungler 3 initiators you essentially have L6 as a "psuedo" ban, a pick that is unlikely for the legion to draft as it is either this or the other pick. So you effectively ban your L6 choice, or their L4/L5.

OKAY now we're past the lock picks, it's time to move onto the regular banning phase. At this stage you want to ban out heroes that are a hassle to your upcoming choices/ try to prevent the legion from getting a pick you can't trade for. So this is where I would like to introduce "banning groups" heroes who I believe are similar to one another and should be banned together as when only one remains are good pickups for legion due to their flexible nature making the hellbourne reveal their draft early (on phase 2 of diagram)

[Keep in mind that these are bans you want to compliment as hellbourne, as legion you want to sneak one of these past bans, and avoid pairs, as when you first pick one, HB gets the other.]

And yes there is overlap in heroes. (Up to discretion of captains which grouping they care more about)

BUBBLES (Literally most frustrating hero in game when you draft delayed stuns, panda, hammer, etc. Also man handles a hag)

Okay, so we're done with banning it's time to PICK (Finally)

PHASE #1 Legion attempts to get the optimal pick here, you either want to pickup a power house initiatior that slipped by, pebbles/rally/deadwood are usually first pick material, otherwise a Torturer/Pyromancer/ Master of arms/ Hag/ Bubbles also are flex picks (To hide your draft as long as possible)

PHASE #2 Hellbourne tries to get two trades for the legion's super strong pick #1. If possible try to pick ambiguous picks here (if no power house heroes slip by) Also, it is acceptable to reveal your hand here if you fear that legion might take your hero before phase 4.

PHASE #3 This is where Legion's draft is revealed unless lock pool is super unique/weird. Usually a Suicide or initiator + carry is picked here.

PHASE #4 This is LITERALLY Hellbournes' only "advantage" over Legion's many lock pick advantages. If drafted properly you can chose to switch a draft from passive to mannup and vice versa depending on your phase 2 picks. This is where you can safely chose to go witch slayer/ Soul Reaper/ Soul stealer/ ETC picks if you know they can no longer chose to mannup against your short lane. Also, you can pick up a hero that can mannup against their lineup as well.

PHASE #5 Legion first picks a hero of their choice, usually it will be the obvious one, such as KOTF/ Ophelia, etc. HOWEVER, on occasion if the hellbourne rely too heavily on getting a certain hero a legion captain might take an inferior hero over all to situationally screw the hellbourne's draft. Such as seeing as a KoTF + Tempest lock and seeing a HB lineup such as, Bubbles, Sandwraith, Empath. If you draft the KoTF now, you give them the jungler they wanted, however if you take the tempest they now have a Sandwraith AND kotf jungle and you can easily mannup on them by sending a tempest mid for example.

PHASE #6/7 These are the least exciting because everything past the first pick is a result of the first pick.

These are the thoughts in my head as I draft, I believe they're relatively advanced and hopefully not too convoluted. Before I end I'll throw in some tidbits I've realized over drafting in a great deal of games.

Never draft a passive carry with a passive suicide against a highly active team. Case in point kotf suicide, sandwraith carry versus a gank squad team (rally/deadwood/pebbles/parasite/hag/etc) It can lead to disasters. Especially since KoTF is dealt with in lane very easily by several pickups such as Soul reaper.

Avoid having a a draft with several skill shot stuns but no set up stuns. (Torturer/pyro/nymphora/etc)

Avoid having a draft filled with pure wombo combo heroes. If the enemy team has enough heroes to poke and prod you can get severely punished for being predictable with the timings you choose to push as five.

Draft as flexible as possible until you can't, this prevents the enemy team from matching your lanes as you pick them.

Hope you guys enjoyed the read. There should be a video in the near future too!

Friday, March 15, 2013

Hey
guys :) So it’s been a while since I made a post, and unlike the
previous ones this one will be about the E-Sports scene, because this
blog is not just about game play and theory crafting but it’s
primary purpose is for critical thinking. This previous weekend’s
ordeal regarding COL and BYE has been talked about to death so I will
avoid the actual specifics of the ordeal but talk about the insight
that can be derived from incidents such as these. Firstly,
the current state of e-sports is extremely anti-competitive and
unrealistic as a whole. To elaborate, in order to become a
professional in a video game such as HON you are supposed to dedicate
hours of your day, day after day and at uncompromising hours as well
meaning that your day is consumed by and revolves around the video
game. Secondly, there is no direct correlation between time invested
and a return for hours committed. What I mean by this is, in real
sports when an athlete becomes drafted or signed into free-agency
they are given a real contract with a real salary along with
benefits.Why
does all this matter? Because if you actually want e-sports to become
a real and thriving scene you cannot have a system which primarily
rewards the top tier teams, SG, COL, TDM as an example. Meaning that
aspiring teams will usually suffer through strife and inner turmoil
as personal lives take a toll on the teams and they often fall apart
and shuffle players around. The reason for this turmoil is the lack
of a realistic return for time invested, a player cannot live off of unreliable
payouts. How do you fix this though?Well
we could take a hint from both Dota 2 and real life sports. There
should be no or significantly less prize money and players wishing to become “competitive”
should enter to be drafted every X months, a period during which
player contracts should be structured around, with this system teams
could expand to larger rosters such as 10 man teams and have
inter-team scrims to have hidden strategies and have a rotating
roster. Additionally with a contractual obligation of sponsorship to
their players, the players would be able to live off of the game and
pay their living expenses. Players would be able to be traded,
dropped, etc.Dota
2 on the other hand has a source of “Crowd” funding for their
teams, they cosmetics which when purchased help fund their favorite
teams, this is something that should be investigated regardless of
the prior statement of larger rosters and have a “set” amount of
competitive teams. A
realistic take on this system, now you read what I’ve had to say
and you wonder, “is this guy crazy?” Well the answer is no,
although I don’t see extremely profitable careers for the majority
of e-athletes i can see a system where they can live off of their
salaries and still make a little bit of money and here’s how.

This part was convoluted as fuck so i'm redoing it. I accidently did math wrong so let me rephrase what i wanted to get across here:10 "fully sponsored" teams in a league system. This would give 33,000$ per "team" in expenses a year, now you may not think that's a lot, but let's just say each and every player lives in europe and needs ~1k to move from EU to USA. so now we ahve 28,000. 28,000, let's subtract 21600 for 1800 a month for a year worth of rent. 6.4k is left over for "team" expenses such as groceries, a budget of 200$ a month per person which is a "decent" amount of a college budget, we come out to 1k a month, so ~6 months worth of groceries is paid for. All other budgeting assignment would be compensated with additional cash from sponsorship + supplemental income. Remember this is off of ONE season's prize pool, extra money could be made off of team cosmetics and streaming revenue and "grand prize" money from side tournaments Also the creation of a silver waging system in the game client would give incentive people to watch streams to stay up to date thus inflating viewer counts on stream days.

Regardless of the actual monetary figures just keep the idea in mind, this would call for another division of hontour where league teams would compete. Diamond would become a "breeding ground" for up and coming players to be drafted from. Plus the league system would more than likely be more attractive for sponsorship.

Saturday, January 26, 2013

The opinions/ideas below are simply a result of my crazy thoughts, so don’t take them too seriously, just food for thought to spark some brainstorming about what might be done to help our current anti-risk meta.IN the current meta we have so much emphasis on strategies involving heroes which have farming abilities and/or mobility mechanisms... TDL, Magebane, Hag, Draconis, Silhouette, basically heroes that can get strong farm, recover from being down (case in point, draconis), or have spells that reduce the risk of less than ideal positioning, in essence what we’ve seen become of the scene is either pseudo trilanes to ensure strong early farm for your carry hero, or a carry hero who has strong lane presence in a 1v1 situation. In essence, you’re not rewarded for innovation or taking laning risks, and anything “innovative” is usually just a small deviation from the standard. Clearly, the “tp” mechanisms must be reworked, it’s not really a point that should be debated, but something more, instead of creating an item to forcibly create gank opportunities such as “smoke of deceit” in Dota 2, i suggest something else.My Idea is the creation/rework of farm-steroid or the creation of game changing items which don’t require massive amounts of farm but instead through the killing of heroes. Possibilities:1) rework alchemist bones, this item needs to be changed in a fashion where it’s strong enough to be a “replacement” for runed axe. In essence, heroes such as predator can now increase their farm in a similar fashion to heroes with high mobility/steroids with runed axe. An idea, create alch bones which can be upgraded to a tier 2 or tier 1 item which allows you to have a “farm” item for certain heroes like nullstone is for heroes with nuke spells, silh/draconis/hag, and runed axe is for tdl/magebane. My personal take on what item should be made, an item which mixes with elder parasite, so that way it’d be the item slot efficient but slightly weaker overall sister itemof abyssal/whispering helm + runed axe. So... Elder parasite (1950) + Alch bones (1900) + Recipe (X gold) :+50 attack speed22% life stealAny hero that dies gives you extra XXX gold, any creep that dies gives you say... 10 gold or +% of cost of killing creep.Activation... increased attack speed 80%, increased movement speed 20%, increased damage taken 20%.In essence this would make it possible for less conventional carries who can’t clear stacks as quickly to still maintain 400+ gpm while having game presence but still not outshine heroes who get to eat tons of stacks (500-600 gpm heroes) Additionally it would also not be a simple replacement for heroes who need the extra beef from a symbol of rage. Additionally it wouldn’t be able to outshine a rune axe for melees. And finally it wouldn’t be optimal to rush over a nullstone for others. It would be an excellent item for heroes with low mobility/farm mechanics but tanky over all. 2)Create an item which increases damage or simply put an item akin to urn of shadows from dota 2, perhaps not a direct port, but something which offers sustainability to players who are ganking so that way there aren’t respites of 60-90 seconds afters ganks for the enemy team. 3) bonus idea:Perhaps a consumable which aids in ganks? An item which silences for X seconds, or stuns for X or grants user vision in surrounding area to avoid blinks into trees, or a one time blink, etc.In essence, what this would do is open up the game to irregular heroes and carries, promote ganking, and/or more active game play so instead of avoiding fights by counter pushing you can fight and still get decent cash flow from it.Anyways, these are my thoughts on what could “come” into this game, as i stated earlier they’re by no means the final solution or even the best, but they’re food for thought on the meta and how we can change it without directly copying Dota 2.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

This is a “translated” version of my HoN guide, I’m a ~1900 mmr Player, so “very high” tier in Dota 2, although i don’t play the game too much anymore I did my best to change hero names, etc so that you can understand the fundamentals to game logic which is similar between the two games. Just to avoid confusion...Short lane means... Alliance/Legion’s/bottom left lane Bottom lane, or Dire’s/top right team’s top lane.Long lane means... Alliance’s top lane, or Dire’s bottom lane.Suicide (I believe it’s a common term in Dota 2 as well) is a lane where one player goes into their team’s long lane, so an Enigma/Lich are common pickups for this role.Aggressive Trilane: A lane consisting of three heroes in their long lane, whereas a psuedo trilane is a dual lane long lane with a jungler in enemy jungle.Aggressive jungler: A jungler in enemy jungle.p.s. I did my best to translate this guy, seeing as i spent a decent amount of time on the original, seen below in the blog. If you disagree with something, feel free to tell me what and why in the reddit and i will do my best to fix it. Additionally i removed a few sections because i didn't feel even "okay" in terms of knowledge on the subject, such as draft theory. In the near future I will try to update it if i play/watch some more dota 2. If you're knowledgeable in hon terms i suggest you view the hon version. Sorry if i missed any translations!!!-iGotThis

Mechanical skill, this in itself will get you out of so many sticky situations, and simply carry you to the “High” bracket without any game theory . (That’s what it did for me, I was really “good” at playing the game but had very little game IQ) Examples:

Pucks’ ultimate, it irks me how often I see this powerful ultimate misused. There will be TONS of situations where an ally could’ve lived or you yourself could’ve turned a fight by simply putting the center of it further from your target for the chain to snap earlier. It’s so simple yet so little people actually do this.

PROPER creep leashing, it’s a simple idea to “click to attack hero” in order to get aggro of creeps to pull lane in your favor, but it’s rarer for individuals to have the state of mind to pull creeps a second/milliseconds before an Auto Attack from opposing hero in order to mess up last hits.

Animation cancelling, often you can get a hero to run in the direction you want by simply animation cancelling enough, case in point, many devo’s will cancel their hook once or twice, maybe thrice, but rarely do they cancel it so frequently that either the enemy hero bolts of ends up getting cornered and you get to eat the hero for free without spending mana on the hook… this has worked A LOT for me.

Playing the “meta” of the game. So obvious factors to this game, such as spells, auto attacks, items, even hero choices. However there are SEVERAL little factoids that people simply don’t understand at lower tier mmr. This section will try to point them out and try to resolve them.

“MID is noob they didn’t gank, gg!” a very common phrase even up to the Very High Tier. However it’s usually just anger at that level of play and more of an idiotic belief in the Low Tier. In reality a mid has a number of options when it comes as to how to “win” their lane.

When their lane leaves, push as hard as possible, chip away at tower, perhaps get early tower, but most of all enemy tower will kill your creeps leading to a wider margin of exp when opponent returns to lane with rune/attempted gank.

When their lane leaves, they should always call MIA within 7 seconds of departure to prevent that exp gap from becoming even once more or even swinging in their favor. Remember, if mid calls mia, just back up, their mid will lose a lot more EXP than your dual lane will, possibly leading to their death/lack of farm further into the game.

If it’s before the level 7-9 mark for mid, you should only expect a gank if you inform them of potential dives which should make them carry a TP, or alternatively they get a lucky rune invis/dd/haste (in which case a smart mid would probably utilize a tp to gank opposite lane assuming vision)

If you’re losing YOUR lane, minimize the damage, it’s infinitely worse to lose say your short lane (Dires’ top lane… Alliances’ short…) and proceed to feed several times following the initial “loss” of your lane. If you continue to play safe and minimize your deaths, you will limit the enemy laner’s GPM to only CS, while alleviating future stress for your team. Just because YOU lost your lane, doesn’t mean mid needs to bust their ass all game to rectify your mistake.

Conversely the following points are regarding what mid SHOULD do/realize. Simply killing the enemy middle DOES NOT mean that you won mid, case in point they send a Shadow Fiend mid who gets killed once or twice, but you’re a Viper/Invoker, he can easily recover in jungle while you’re too busy basking in the glory of “winning” mid and not ganking your side lanes because mid is “useless now”

When you go to rune control by guessing, always chose them by this order of logic:

Is there an enemy jungler that can kill you if you go towards your ancients? IF so, go to your “safe” side meaning where your shortlane/jungle can back you up.

If you chose the long lane side,Dire’s bottom, Alliance Top, you can now STACK the ancients for your carry or for yourself for a later point in time, it really takes no time/effort.

Utilize your “Side” advantages, Alliance side has the small camp to stack and potentially nuke down to catch up, Not sure if applicable to Dota 2, Dire MIGHT have easy access to secret shop by cutting through a tree behind their middle tower.

In reference to the “TP” tidbit in prior point, as a MID you should carry a TP with you past the 3 minute mark, or at latest the 4-5 min mark when you bring yourself your boots + extra stuff… The earlier you get your tp, the more unexpected a TP gank to your side lanes. You should teleport after grabbing a rune to opposite side, (assuming you see some sort of reaction/are seen) OR right before your intended lane is about to be pushed back towards your tower forcing the enemy team to stick their neck out.

If you’re playing support, you SHOULD rather have 2 wards on map and a flying courier even if that means having no boots, even if you become a bigger target, just trade your exp range for safer positioning and rely on YOUR carry/gankers/junglers to do their job because this is YOURS.

When an enemy team is pushing, don’t just teleport right away and just simply stand around twiddling your thumbs. One of the biggest imbalances in this game is how much pushing as a group is NOT worth it. If they’re pushing as 5, they’re grouping up and losing TONS of EXP. Ideal response to enemy 5 man push:

2 or 3 players, primarily the supports, but should be optimized by heroes with the best abilities to spam down the waves, should be waiting at tower trying to delay the push.

The rest of the team, should either be pushing out lanes so that your creeps can start working on towers, additionally carries (assuming that there’s a strong possibility that the enemy can tp 2 or 3 people back to tower and jump the solo pusher with Blink Dagger then the player should farm out their ancient’s jungle during their push, although it’s by far and wide more conventional to simply push out lanes, take every bit of farm possible.

Note: I believe this is valid in Dota 2: The current “meta” does NOT advocate static farming for long periods of times. Although farming is EXTREMELY important in today’s games, it is a different sort of farming. You will often see competitive teams go for quick towers before their enemy can mount a resistance, additionally tower trades are very common. THEREFORE, it is usually inconvenient for a gank/suicide hero to static farm the long lane because:

Although the static farming of the lane will force the enemy team to pull their short lane in order to regain lane control it will also in essence turn the game into a 4v3, because your carry will be at this point most likely in jungle farming stacks, you’re top, all that remains are at most three heroes, assuming your own jungler isn’t say at ancients. Thus REQUIRING superb vision of the map.

As an alternative to exclusive static farming, keep an eye on the map, when you see that the enemy is “focused” on a lane opposite of yours, push right away, do so before they actually arrive at the lane, e.g. you see them walk by a river ward.

Additionally, static farming 2 waves and pushing out on the third, and do some damage, forcing an enemy reaction and retreating to farm jungle as the carry is extremely important.

When should you trade tower for tower?

When you’re down a significant player and teams are on even footing, OR if you have a major cooldown that usually decides the outcome of a fight (Blackhole)

When you’re down in gold/exp, in fact, if you see the enemy grouping up for a push, it’s best to have one or two people chip at a tower say, middle, and the other three/four push out a lane together OPPOSITE of the pushed lane so that there is no proper way to “defend” the lane but to split tp-defend, meaning that you may potentially be able to get a kill out of their tp’s.

Level advantages, this is a topic that is rarely discussed but super important. In YOUR short lane, you will naturally get an EXP advantage by ~30 seconds even with same CS simply because the long lane’s creeps die quicker thanks to short lane tower, so when you push AWAY from short lane’s tower you are likely to be “out leveling” your enemy, this is PRIME time to make a jump on them.

This topic was touched earlier, but a KEY aspect to leaving a lane whether at mid or side lane is that you should always push it out even if you were static farming it because you will get a bit of additional gold and lose less experience. Leaving the lane would mean going for rune, gank, or simply leaving to defend another tower.

Assuming you have a carry which can rotate into jungle rather early in the game as a support it is your duty (given an easy lane say versus a suicide hero) to try to leech as little experience as possible, roam, stack jungle, leave a lane ward when absent, and guard runes, during their time in jungle later on you can recover esp by leaching exp at ancients/level 3 camps or static farming the safe lane/ganks.

Assuming there is a HARD lane, meaning they’re challenging your short lane, so it’s 2v2 or 3v2, it is the short lane’s job to simply stay alive and naturally out last hit their enemy, it is on their heads to make something happen, because assuming good lane control you can stay safe under the tower.

Hero composition, types of comps: (Sorry if my logic is outdated/not competitive level, i did my best in here “translating”)

Dual mid, suicide, solo short, + jungle. This method is EXTREMELY powerful if enemy team is relying on one carry hero to simply dominate the game, so in cases like these, you would put a strong dual lane mid, e.g. Crystal Maiden + Sven, put a solo short lane which can win lane without assistance (because by the original assumption they should have a safe suicide Lich or Enigma or Puck) so a INSERT STRONG RANGE CARRY/SEMI CARRY, long lane should be standard suicide either Lich, puck, etc and jungler should an aggressive jungler preferably in enemy jungle, possibly a chen, this allows mid to be ganked and long lane to be ganked due to creep pulling or natural deny of Lich/Enigma. With the use of a suicide puck against a pseudo trilane it might be best to simply jungle your own jungle and dominate both short and mid. Relies on:

Powerful dual mid which should be able to contend against most other dual lanes and if not have easy rotation into aggressive pseudo trilane.

Short lane as mentioned should with easily but, it should more than that be capable to semi-carry as this lineup generally features an ensemble of “strong” heroes but lacks heroes which have little lane presence early on such as melee carries.

Long lane has to be adjusted for your jungler, if it’ll be aggressive a Lich would be ideal as it would allow you to gank their short lane, especially with assistance of Mid support.

Dual short, suicide, solo mid, own jungle. This strategy is used primarily with a group of heroes that have to use “numbers” to their advantage, so lanes such as Crystal Maiden+ week melee carry here + jungling enigma, which would make challenging the lane for the opposition extremely difficult.

You should consider employing an active jungler and not a passive one in cases such as these because the enemy team may pretend to draft a Lich as a suicide and say a Dazzle as support but in reality solo short the Dazzle (a really powerful hero in that role) and have a support pr with a ranged carry (e.g. Gyrocopter) or semi carry (Leshrac..?) with an aggressive jungler or abuse roam from Lich and a support in middle such as a support Lich/Venge/cm/wind runner.

Your suicide should be capable of doing well against a 1 + jungler because in cases like these it is highly likely assuming an adaptive enemy team, that they will send a powerful hero in short and have a dual lane mid to attempt to win two lanes while you divert the majority of your assets to winning your short lane.

This composition is extremely reliant on a carry with about 450 gpm at mid game, remember that the support and even jungler should stack the jungle up at places where the jungler will not actively farm, e.g. reserve one level 2 and one level 3 camp, or simply have jungler rotate to enemy jungle or ancients to compensate for farm. Remember that as a jungler in this strategy you must utilize spawns as effectively as possible, so don’t block spawns, and if you can’t kill the creeps in time, simply stack the camp and finish it off afterwards.

Psuedo aggressive trilane (long lane), 1 mid, 1 short. This strategy relies on challenging the second strategy of having an extremely fortified long lane, the reason this lane is specifically geared towards this in my mind is that rather than focusing on mid/short this focuses primarily on jungle and their short. Obviously tp ganks can help ensure a victory in your own short against their suicide, and mid can possibly win depending on the situation.

This setup requires either Ophelia or even enigma. Although I would highly advise the previous three before tempest.

Long lane should be double ranged, in case of a scenario where the enemy dual lane is double range, say venge/cm + Ranged carry. This way they can’t be out harassed before jungle becomes involved.

Ideal candidates for this scenario involve lich as support, and a ranged hero with a stun. Alternatively you can use a strong support such as an wind runner/cm as well.

Jungle should be involved in not only ganking long lane but mid and disrupting enemy jungler farm as much as possible, seeing as chen does well in enemy jungle it is highly likely that you will have success even against a tempest.

1-1-1 with roaming supports between mid and long lane. So in essence it’s an aggressive trilane, I call it a 1-1-1 simply because in order to avoid severe lack of levels the supports should roam and in essence have 3 soloes. Requires mid to be capable of getting cs passively (beast master) or have an escape (qop) while being able to nuke or stun as well for when dual support roam mid.

This strategy puts the strain of succeeding on your head because the enemy will naturally gain higher exp than you, but in the early game when laning is a major component you will have a severely more cautious enemy.

The enemy team may react in two ways, challenge the roam with a strong jungle and have enemy support assist the jungler, or more likely rotate jungler and support as to win long lane and middle.

If your supports aren’t achieving kills, it is probably more important to dissolve the roam and resume a 1-2-2 meaning 1 short, 2 mid, 2 long, until of course you see another opportunity to roam. REMEMBER, if you’re not getting kills or absolutely demolishing your enemy in CS this strategy is not worth it.

What makes a carry good?

The ability to escape and high mobility

Strong laning presence and team fight

The ability to farm faster as the game progresses, this is done by either have a passive or item which assists in farming

A common misconception is that heroes that carry well are in essence the ones that scale incredibly well with items, e.g. crits. However, heroes such as skeleton king, etc, will struggle with farming up said items making it difficult for them to carry. Also a strong case in point is that carries will often get crowd controlled making it all the more important that they can gap close or be ranged.

Tips to maximize your farm.

An obvious one is always stack (as mentioned earlier in this post)

If you have multiple “farmers” on your team, fourth farmer, your third should be spending time trying to reduce enemy farm, based on enemy positioning your hero taking enemy farm should be aware and be quick to rotate to a safer position.

Always pull back the camp you’re killing if it means you can’t stack it... just move your lazy ass and stack it.

If you can’t get there yourself, use your spells to stack, you can also use some spells to block enemy spawns.

Understanding Gold and EXP advantage.

You can achieve a gold advantage without holding the EXP advantage. Case in point, you are pushing a lot as a group of five, but the enemy can for the most part hold its own against you while their carry farms, although you might net more kills at first, their team will slowly begin to outlevel you which might lead to later fights ending in their favor and swinging gold back in theirs.

Blocking a camp for enemy team is extremely important because under the assumption of good farming mechanics that is a 50-200ish gold a minute, which does add up agaisnt their team, so block it using spells/killing the camp/wards.

Sometimes you KNOW where the enemy team is, that is your clue to go and take their stacks or push nearby towers, assuming you cannot gank them or it is not in your best interest. Too often do i see people unsure of what they want to do and end up doing nothing while enemy team ends up farming, if you don’t plan on fighting, don’t teleport/walk in that direction.

If your strategy revolves around team fights, you should always remember to stack/farm in between or else the disparity between levels will grow extremely high, farming will keep the gap manageable.

Map Control

Map control is gained in two ways,

Majority of your heroes are deadly to the opponents so running into even one of you will often lead to their deaths, usually when your strategy involves a Fayde/pebbles this is true.

You have the vast majority of map vision and even if you don’t have the strongest gankers/nukers you will still seem extremely intimidating to the enemy.

Map control is kept in two ways,

Pushing lanes where you can deduce they are not present at, thus making their “gank” squad element fall to shambles as they try to TP to stop split pushes.

Great warding, usually i recommend I recommend to keep two wards up at the majority of the phases of the game, but assuming you don’t overlap you should have an extra ward or two to place at the more “frightening” stages of the game. I highly recommend warding like so with three wards when on the defensive:

Put a ward that sees some or most of the middle lane, this could be the Allianceancients, or anywhere near where mid towers were, but keep to the side opposite of your jungle, usually it’s good practice to make it gain some vision close to your ancients if your Dire this could be a bit tricky, so instead of placing it at Alliance ancients, place it near Alliance jungle entrance which is a good spot to watch over your own ancients, and use another ward near mid lane’s entrance to Dires’ jungle. This is the warder’s personal preference... (Alliance has an advantage in this regard as they can easily view mid lane, and ancients)

Put a ward at the entrance of your jungle, the obvious ramp up for Alliance, or the middle above the top rune spawn, on the ledge that DOESN’T block the level two neutral spawn. (Sees most of both entrances to the jungle.

Put a lane ward at your short lane, so that way even when their long lane is pushed against your short’s tower, they can’t sneak into your jungle. So in conclusion, you have all “entrances” to your jungle covered, along with most/some of mid lane + some/most of ancients, giving you powerful knowledge against enemy roam and good protection of your farm.

So I’m extremely bored and not able to play hon, so I’m going to write a “guide” for everyone <1850 mmr as to how to get to that “top” tier. Who am I? My tag is iGotThis and I fluctuate between 1860s and 1890s playing on USE, USW, and EU.

Mechanical skill, this in itself will get you out of so many sticky situations, and simply carry you to the 1700s without any game theory . (That’s what it did for me, I was really “good” at playing the game but had very little game IQ) Examples:

Bubbles’ ultimate, it irks me how often I see this powerful ultimate misused. There will be TONS of situations where an ally could’ve lived or you yourself could’ve turned a fight by simply putting the center of it further from your target for the chain to snap earlier. It’s so simple yet so little people actually do this.

PROPER creep leashing, it’s a simple idea to “click to attack hero” in order to get agro of creeps to pull lane in your favor, but it’s rarer for individuals to have the state of mind to pull creeps a second/milliseconds before an AA from opposing hero in order to mess up last hits.

Animation cancelling, often you can get a hero to run in the direction you want by simply animation cancelling enough, case in point, many devo’s will cancel their hook once or twice, maybe thrice, but rarely do they cancel it so frequently that either the enemy hero bolts of ends up getting cornered and you get to eat the hero for free without spending mana on the hook… this has worked A LOT for me.

Playing the “meta” of the game. So obvious factors to this game, such as spells, auto attacks, items, even hero choices. However there are SEVERAL little factoids that people simply don’t understand at lower tier mmr. This section will try to point them out and try to resolve them.

“MID is noob they didn’t gank, gg!” a very common phrase even up to the 1900s. However it’s usually just anger at that mmr and more of an idiotic belief in the 1500s. In reality a mid has a number of options when it comes as to how to “win” their lane.

When their lane leaves, push as hard as possible, chip away at tower, perhaps get early tower, but most of all enemy tower will kill your creeps leading to a wider margin of exp when opponent returns to lane with rune/attempted gank.

When their lane leaves, they should always call MIA within 7 seconds of departure to prevent that exp gap from becoming even once more or even swinging in their favor. Remember, if mid calls mia, just back up, their mid will lose a lot more EXP than your dual lane will, possibly leading to their death/lack of farm further intot he game.

If it’s before the level 7-9 mark for mid, you should only expect a gank if you inform them of potential dives which should make them carry a TP, or alternatively they get a lucky rune invis/dd/haste (in which case a smart mid would probably utilize a tp to gank opposite lane assuming vision)

If you’re losing YOUR lane, minimize the damage, it’s infinitely worse to lose say your short lane (HB’s top lane… legion’s short…) and proceed to feed several times following the initial “loss” of your lane. If you continue to play safe and minimize your deaths, you will limit the enemy laner’s GPM to only CS, while alleviating future stress for your team. Just because YOU lost your lane, doesn’t mean mid needs to bust their ass all game to rectify your mistake.

Conversely the following points are regarding what mid SHOULD do/realize. Simply killing the enemy middle DOES NOT mean that you won mid, case in point they send a Soul stealer mid who gets killed once or twice, but you’re an arachna, he can easily recover in jungle while you’re too busy basking in the glory of “winning” mid and not ganking your side lanes because mid is “useless now”

When you go to rune control by guessing, always chose them by this order of logic:

Is there an enemy jungler that can kill you if you go towards your ancients? IF so, go to your “safe” side meaning where your shortlane/jungle can back you up.

If you chose the long lane side, HB’s bottom, Legion’s Top, you can now STACK the ancients for your carry or for yourself for a later point in time, it really takes no time/effort.

Utilize your “Side” advantages, legion side has the small camp to stack and potentially nuke down to catch up, hellbourne has easy access to secret shop by cutting through a tree behind their middle tower.

In reference to the “TP” tidbit in prior point, as a MID you should carry a TP with you past the 3 minute mark, or at latest the 4-5 min mark when you bring yourself your boots + extra stuff… The earlier you get your tp, the more unexpected a TP gank to your side lanes. You should teleport after grabbing a rune to opposite side, (assuming you see some sort of reaction/are seen) OR right before your intended lane is about to be pushed back towards your tower forcing the enemy team to stick their neck out.

If you’re playing support, you SHOULD rather have 2 wards on map and a flying courier even if that means having no boots, even if you become a bigger target, just trade your exp range for safer positioning and rely on YOUR carry/gankers/junglers to do their job because this is YOURS.

When an enemy team is pushing, don’t just teleport right away and just simply stand around twiddling your thumbs. One of the biggest imbalances in this game is how much pushing as a group is NOT worth it. If they’re pushing as 5, they’re grouping up and losing TONS of EXP. Ideal response to enemy 5 man push:

2 or 3 players, primarily the supports, but should be optimized by heroes with the best abilities to spam down the waves, should be waiting at tower trying to delay the push.

The rest of the team, should either be pushing out lanes so that your creeps can start working on towers, additionally carries (assuming that there’s a strong possibility that they can tp 2 or 3 people back to tower and jump the solo pusher with PK then the player should farm out their ancient’s jungle during their push, although it’s by far and wide more conventional to simply push out lanes, take every bit of farm possible.

The current “meta” does NOT advocate static farming for long periods of times. Although farming is EXTREMELY important in today’s games, it is a different sort of farming. You will often see competitive teams go for quick towers before their enemy can mount a resistance, additionally tower trades are very common. THEREFORE, it is usually inconvenient for a gank/suicide hero to static farm the long lane because:

Although the static farming of the lane will force the enemy team to pull their short lane in order to regain lane control it will also in essence turn the game into a 4v3, because your carry will be at this point most likely in jungle farming stacks, you’re top, all that remains are at most three heroes, assuming your own jungler isn’t say at ancients. Thus REQUIRING superb vision of the map.

As an alternative to exclusive static farming, keep an eye on the map, when you see that the enemy is “focused” on a lane opposite of yours, push right away, do so before they actually arrive at the lane, e.g. you see them walk by a river ward.

Additionally, static farming 2 waves and pushing out on the third, and do some damage, forcing an enemy reaction and retreating to farm jungle as the carry is extremely important.

When should you trade tower for tower?

When you’re down a significant player and teams are on even footing, OR if you have a major cooldown that usually decides the outcome of a fight (elemental void)

When you’re down in gold/exp, in fact, if you see the enemy grouping up for a push, it’s best to have one person chip at a tower say, middle, and the other four push out a lane together OPPOSITE of the pushed lane so that there is no proper way to “defend” the lane but to split tp-defend, meaning that you may potentially be able to get a kill out of their tp’s.

Level advantages, this is a topic that is rarely discussed but super important. In YOUR short lane, you will naturally get an EXP advantage by ~30 seconds even with same CS simply because the long lane’s creeps die quicker thanks to short lane tower, so when you push AWAY from short lane’s tower you are likely to be “out leveling” your enemy, this is PRIME time to make a jump on them.

This topic was touched earlier, but a KEY aspect to leaving a lane whether at mid or side lane is that you should always push it out even if you were static farming it because you will get a bit of additional gold and lose less experience. Leaving the lane would mean going for rune, gank, or simply leaving to defend another tower.

Assuming you have a carry which can rotate into jungle rather early in the game as a support it is your duty (given an easy lane say versus a suicide hero) to try to leech as little experience as possible, roam, stack jungle, leave a lane ward when absent, and guard runes, during their time in jungle later on you can recover esp by leaching exp at ancients/level 3 camps or static farming the safe lane/ganks.

Assuming there is a HARD lane, meaning they’re challenging your short lane, so it’s 2v2, it is the short lane’s job to simply stay alive and naturally out last hit their enemy, it is on their heads to make something happen, because assuming good lane control you can stay safe under the tower.

Hero composition, types of comps:

Dual mid, suicide, solo short, + jungle. This method is EXTREMELY powerful if enemy team is relying on one carry hero to simply dominate the game, so in cases like these, you would put a strong dual lane mid, e.g. Engi + mag, tort + aluna, put a solo short lane which can win lane without assistance (because by the original assumption they should have a safe suicide PR or bubbles) so a silhouette, arachna, soul reaper, Tort, long lane should be standard suicide either KOTF, or PR, or Bubbles, and jungler should an aggressive jungler preferably in enemy jungle, possibly an Ophelia or parasite, this allows mid to be ganked and long lane to be ganked due to creep pulling or natural deny of PR. With the use of a suicide bubbles against a pseudo trilane it might be best to simply jungle your own jungle and dominate both short and mid. Relies on:

Powerful dual mid which should be able to contend against most other dual lanes and if not have easy rotation into aggressive pseudo trilane.

Short lane as mentioned should with easily but, it should more than that be capable to semi-carry as this lineup generally features an ensemble of “strong” heroes but lacks heroes which have little lane presence early on such as melee carries.

Long lane has to be adjusted for your jungler, if it’ll be aggressive a PR would be ideal as it would allow you to gank their short lane, especially with assistance of Mid support.

Dual short, suicide, solo mid, own jungle. This strategy is used primarily with a group of heroes that have to use “numbers” to their advantage, so lanes such as Glac + tdl + jungling tempest, which would make challenging the lane for the opposition extremely difficult.

You should consider employing an active jungler and not a passive one in cases such as these because the enemy team may pretend to draft a PR as a suicide and say a DS as support but in reality solo short the DS (a really powerful hero in that role) and have a support pr with a ranged carry (e.g. fa) or semi carry (tort/moa) with an aggressive jungler or abuse roam from PR and a support in middle such as a support tort/andro/glacius/aluna.

Your suicide should be capable of doing well against a 1 + jungler because in cases like these it is highly likely assuming an adaptive enemy team, that they will send a powerful hero in short and have a dual lane mid to attempt to win two lanes while you divert the majority of their assets tow inning their short lane.

This composition is extremely reliant on a carry with about 450 gpm at mid game, remember that the support and even jungler should stack the jungle up at places where the jungler will not actively farm, e.g. reserve one level 2 and one level 3 camp, or simply have jungler rotate to enemy jungle or ancients to compensate for farm. Remember that as a jungler in this strategy you must utilize spawns as effectively as possible, so try not to kill spawns inside the camp at 37 seconds.

Psuedo aggressive trilane (long lane), 1 mid, 1 short. This strategy relies on challenging the second strategy of having an extremely fortified long lane, the reason this lane is specifically geared towards this in my mind is that rather than focusing on mid/short this focuses primarily on jungle and their short. Obviously tp ganks can help ensure a victory in your own short against their suicide, and mid can possibly win depending on the situation.

This setup requires either Ophelia or Parasite, cthulu, or even tempest. Although I would highly advise the previous three before tempest.

Long lane should be double ranged, in case of a scenario where the enemy dual lane is double range, say andro/glacius + fa/silh. This way they can’t be out harassed before jungle becomes involved.

Ideal candidates for this scenario involve PR as support, and a ranged hero with a stun, FA/Tort/Moa/silh. Alternatively you can use a strong support such as an aluna/glacius as well.

Jungle should be involved in not only ganking long lane but mid and disrupting enemy jungler farm as much as possible, seeing as a parasite and Ophelia are top tier at this duty it is highly likely that you will have success even against a tempest.

1-1-1 with roaming supports between mid and long lane. So in essence it’s an aggressive trilane, I call it a 1-1-1 simply because in order to avoid severe lack of levels the supports should roam and in essence have 3 soloes. Requires mid to be capable of getting cs passively (tundra) or have an escape (hag) while being able to nuke or stun as well for when dual support roam mid.

This strategy puts the strain of succeeding on your head because the enemy will naturally gain higher exp than you, but in the early game when laning is a major component you will have a severely more cautious enemy.

The enemy team may react in two ways, challenge the roam with a strong jungle and have enemy support assist the jungler, or more likely rotate jungler and support as to win long lane and middle.

If your supports aren’t achieving kills, it is probably more important to dissolve the roam and resume a 1-2-2 meaning 1 short, 2 mid, 2 long, until of course you see another opportunity to roam. REMEMBER, if you’re not getting kills or absolutely demolishing your enemy in CS this strategy is not worth it.

What makes a carry good?

The ability to escape and high mobility (tdl, hag, silh, magebane)

Strong laning presence and team fight (moonqueen, FA, silh)

The ability to farm faster as the game progresses, this is done by either have a passive or item which assists in farming (draconis, moonqueen, silh, tdl, soul stealer)

A common misconception is that heroes that carry well are in essence the ones that scale incredibly well with items, e.g. crits. However, heroes such as this, madman, scout, etc, will struggle with farming up said items making it difficult for them to carry. Also a strong case in point is that carries will often get crowd controlled making it all the more important that they can gap close or be ranged.

Tips to maximize your farm.

An obvious one is always satck (as mentioned earlier in this post)

If you have multiple “farmers” on your team, e.g. draconis, Hag/tort, and a KoTF you do not want a fourth farmer, e.g. a Tort, but seeing as you have three, the general lineup would be, give 1 lane + jungle to carry, give 1 lane to static farm for Hag, and let KOTF jungle in enemy jungle taking stacks, trying to reduce enemy farm, additionally when unsafe kotf should be able to rotate to a portion of the jungle whether it be ancients or a few of the regular jungle camps. Depending on if ancients get stacked for carry.

A tip for a GROUP of players, in my personal opinion ancients should only ever be DOUBLE stacked, unless carry plans to come within the minute and is stacking or pushing out elsewhere. The REASON for this is because...

you prevent the “damage done” if enemy choses to take your ancients, with the exception of early game (<10 minutes) because at that point the more stacked the better as it can lead to kills as they struggle to steal ancients, but as game progresses, it becomes easier for them.

Your carry can time their farming-route to arrive there at ~49 seconds and stack for themselves while you stack elsewhere or get some nice static farm exp/place wards/ counter wards/gank

NEVER kill camps inside their spawn point (on purpose) after/at XX:37 seconds, it will block the next spawn which is a loss of say anywhere from 50-200 gold that minute. You may think it isn’t a big deal, but say you block spawns for your TDL/Magebane/Draconis/Moonqueen, that average of 125 gold, is going to add up, say it only happens 5 times, that’s a good 725 gold they’ve lost in a game, that’s equivilant to a death at end game stage.

If you can’t get there yourself, use your spells to stack, examples:

Aluna power throw green and red

Pharoah rocket, make sure that the “center” of the circle isn’t inside the camp and it will stack, because the center of the circle spawns a gadget which blocks spawns :TIP: you can use this to block enemy spawns.

Understanding Gold and EXP advantage.

You can achieve a gold advantage without holding the EXP advantage. Case in point, you are pushing a lot as a group of five, but the enemy can for the most part hold its own against you while their carry farms, although you might net more kills at first, their team will slowly begin to outlevel you which might lead to later fights ending in their favor and swining gold back in theirs.

Blocking a camp for enemy team is extremely important because under the assumption of good farming mechanics that is a 50-200ish gold a minute, which does add up agaisnt their team, so block it using spells/killing the camp/wards.

Sometimes you KNOW where the enemy team is, that is your clue to go and take their stacks or push nearby towers, assuming you cannot gank them or it is not in your best interest. Too often do i see people unsure of what they want to do and end up doing nothing while enemy team ends up farming, if you don’t plan on fighting, don’t teleport/walk in that direction.

If your strategy revolves around team fights, you should always remember to stack/farm in between or else the disparity between levels will grow extremely high, farming will keep the gap manageable.

Map Control

Map control is gained in two ways,

Majority of your heroes are deadly to the opponents so running into even one of you will often lead to their deaths, usually when your strategy involves a Fayde/pebbles this is true.

You have the vast majority of map vision and even if you don’t have the strongest gankers/nukers you will still seem extremely intimidating to the enemy.

Map control is kept in two ways,

Pushing lanes where you can deduce they are not present at, thus making their “gank” squad element fall to shambles as they try to TP to stop split pushes.

Great warding, usually i recommend I recommend to keep two wards up at the majority of the phases of the game, but assuming you don’t overlap you should have an extra ward or two to place at the more “frightening” stages of the game. I highly recommend warding like so with three wards when on the defensive:

Put a ward that sees some or most of the middle lane, this could be the legion ancients, or anywhere near where mid towers were, but keep to the side opposite of your jungle, usually it’s good practice to make it gain some vision close to your ancients if your hellbourne this could be a bit tricky, so instead of placing it at legion ancients, place it near legion jungle entrance which is a good spot to watch over your own ancients, and use another ward near mid lane’s entrance to HB’s jungle. This is the warder’s personal preference... (legion has an advantage in this regard as they can easily view mid lane, and ancients)

Put a ward at the entrance of your jungle, the obvious ramp up for legion, or the middle above the top rune spawn, on the ledge that DOESN’T block the level two neutral spawn. (Sees most of both entrances to the jungle.

Put a lane ward at your short lane, so that way even when their long lane is pushed against your short’s tower, they can’t sneak into your jungle. So in conclusion, you have all “entrances” to your jungle covered, along with most/some of mid lane + some/most of ancients, giving you powerful knowledge against enemy roam and good protection of your farm.

Drafting heroes

Hero synergy is one of the hardest thing to do for a extremely low tier team. I dual captain a gold division team and still feel like i’m learning a lot about drafting each game. So here’s some great pointers for you start off on.

Don’t look at “great” heroes to pickup on a turn by turn basis, stick to a plan and simply replace picked/banned heroes with similar ones... (don’t try to force a fayde in just because she’s on the board if you locked for a different strategy, it’s possible that it could be baited for a better hero choice to match THEIR lineup)

Try to keep lineups in this sort of logic

Carry/Hard farmer : remains true no matter the strategy, a zephyr in a mid-game strat, or a TDL in a more end game strat. They should require a majority stake in your jungle (farming triple stacked ancients + 2 mixed camps) OR (entire jungle with exception of ancients) + 1 lane every minute.

Primary Support: Essentially never farms

Secondary Support/Jungle: in case of second support, should receive mediocre farm from time to time, but primarily retains gold by not spending it on an excessive amount of wards. Jungler’s farm depends on hero, if hero can farm enemy jungle (kotf) or only needs some items (tempest) or clears tons of jungle (legionare) or pushes/kills for farm (ophelia)

Ganker/initiator: Farm usually contends with carries until a carry rotates to jungle. During which this role may explode as well via kills/assists/towers.

Suicide/Solo mid/short: When challenged will suffer at first and require to recover throughout mid game... farm has huge disparity between games.

Seeing the above roles, here’s the point I try to make. If you have a Legionare, and a Draconis and a KoTF your jungle is going to be always depleted, so therefore Keeper should in essence NEVER farm your jungle and it should always be split between legionare/draconis. Legionare should compensate for lesser stack numbers by ganking. As you can see, your team composition is already at risk of farm starvation, something that you as a drafter should be keen of. Drafting two heroes who farm at similar paces and require similar stack numbers leads to deprivation for one or both heroes with the exception of when one hero gets “fed” a situation you can’t always rely upon. Above example would feature a draft such as: KOTF suicide, Legionare jungle, Dual mid e.g. glac + tort, solo short draconis (who can contest with majority of suicide heroes) Additionally it could be a mid solo hero hag/bubbles/tort and a dual bottom.

A bit of insight I believe is one of the most important ones is that your jungler should ALWAYS be adjusted for their laning specifically their suicide. Case in point, Legionnaire is a good jungler versus a suicide Keeper of the Forest or Plague rider because Pr cannot escape nor stun the legionare, and keeper’s invis is useless after he gets “taunted”. But a Tempest on the other hand will struggle to gap close a PR and will need Dust and all his minions to do enough damage with the lane to kill the suicide keeper... not to mention fog of war cancellation of mini stuns on glacial blasts.

Picking a Demented Shaman/Torturer/Aluna/is good not only because they’re great supports, but they can also take over the solo of middle/shortlane if need be.

If you see a powerful dual mid such a Magmus + Engineer, you can easily beat it by using heroes with strong harass but weaker team fight, so a Ranged support + Grave keeper/Torturer/Master of arms (he can be the support too :O)/ Even a ranged carry.. Hon is usually about minimizing risk, thus the roles of suicides and junglers as opposed to trilanes with roam. However, sometimes it’s a good idea to challenge their “dominant” lane.

For all those who sometimes debate when they have first pick out of lock pool, if you see a keeper and a tempest, always pick the keeper, better suicide, a bit worse at jungling early on but makes up for it with easier enemy jungling late game and better consistent push, doesn’t need to split his trees to get a strong push going. Also his ultimate isn’t reliant on absolute perfect initiation as it can’t be interrupted.

If you’re going to do an aggressive trilane with two roamers, make sure that their jungle can’t safely farm in your jungle, also, make it hell for their middle and even have occasional tp-ganks to your short lane. For an aggressive trilane it is my opinion that you should run it with three ranged heroes.

That’s it for now, I can’t think of anything else, if you have any additional ideas let me know!